A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History

A FIELD ON FIRE

a Field on Fire

The Future of Environmental History

Edited by Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2001-0

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9208-6

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction: A Good Set of Walking Shoes Mark D. Hersey

I. FACING LIMITS

1. Subversive Subjects: Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History Ted Steinberg

2. Can Capitalism Ever Be Green? Adam Rome

3. Seeing Like a God: Environmentalism in the Anthropocene Frank Zelko

4. The Locked Door: Thomas Midgley Jr., Chlorofluorocarbons, and the Unintended Consequences of Technology Kevin C. Armitage

5. Malibu, California: Edenic Illusions and Natural Disasters Christof Mauch

6. Energizing Environmental History Brian C. Black

II. WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS

7. The Force of Fiber: Reconnecting the Philippines with Latin America and the American West via Transnational Environmental History Sterling Evans

8. Hunting and Wilderness in the Creation of National Identities Mikko Saikku

9. Why We Need Comparative History: The Case of China and the United States Shen Hou

10. The World in a Tin Can: Migrants in Environmental History Marco Armiero

11. Down in the Sky: The Promise of Aerial Environmental History Robert Wellman Campbell

12. Rivers of Dust: An Environmental Historian Appraises the American Legal System Karl Boyd Brooks

III. DOING ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

13. Whole Earth without Borders: Earth Photographs, Space Data, and the Importance of Visual Culture within Environmental History Neil M. Maher

14. Beyond Stories: Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental History Sara M. Gregg

15. Low-Hanging Fruit: Science and Environmental History Edmund Russell

16. The Watershed of War: Environmental History and the Big Civil War Brian Allen Drake

17. War from the Ground Up: Integrating Military and Environmental Histories Lisa M. Brady

Afterword: The Distinctiveness of Environmental History Daniel T. Rodgers

Bibliography

About the Contributors

Index

FIGURES

7.1. Map of the Pacific Ocean with the Manila Galleon trade routes, 1748

11.1. Evangelists depicted in the Book of Kells, ca. 800

11.2. Great Seal of the United States

11.3. Chart of Revolutionary War battles, leaders, and congresses

11.4. State population growth by altitude, 2008–2009

11.5. Sacred Place ad, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, 1945

13.1. ATS 3 Earth photograph, 1967

13.2. Apollo 8 Earth photograph, 1968

13.3. Apollo 17 Earth photograph, 1972

13.4. Earth Day 1990 logo

13.5. Cover from NASA’s Remote Measurement of Pollution, 1971

13.6. British Antarctic Survey ozone depletion graph, 1985

13.7. NASA ozone hole, 1985

13.8. Global temperature anomalies, January 2016

14.1. Map of Enlarged Homestead Act lands in Montana, 1916

14.2. US Geological Survey map series, georeferenced and clipped using ArcGIS

14.3. Snapshot of A View of the World from Houston visualization

Introduction

A Good Set of Walking Shoes

MARK D. HERSEY

In an influential essay penned in 1988, Donald Worster challenged his fellow historians to rethink the boundaries of their discipline. Motivated by the political and social turmoil of the twentieth century, Worster’s peers had pushed beyond great man histories, through sophisticated political studies, and probed deeply into the lives of ordinary citizens. Rescuing the long-neglected masses from the enormous condescension of posterity, to borrow E. P. Thompson’s famous phrase, historians had made huge strides in exploring the ways in which a multitude of social factors had shaped the everyday lives of people in the past. But historians had not yet pushed far enough. They needed to dig even more deeply, Worster insisted, down to the earth itself.¹

Historians’ efforts to recover the lives of ordinary people had entailed a rejection of the arrogant assumption that the only lives and decisions that mattered were those of elites, but they had nevertheless perpetuated a hubris of a different kind. Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others, after all, had highlighted the profound connection people shared with the natural world. The far-reaching ramifications of their insights had revolutionized much of modern society, including a sizable number of academic disciplines, but the implications of evolution—biology as history—had yet to resonate among historians. Consequently, historians had neglected one of humanity’s central stories: the domination of nature by Homo sapiens, an adaptable and immensely influential species with a predilection for pushing ecological boundaries.²

The significance of this story was self-evident, though historians appeared largely indifferent to it, having offered but few studies that might help clarify the forces undergirding the most environmentally destructive century in history. Nor had they paid much attention to the interaction between people and nature over time more generally, the work of some important predecessors to the practice of a self-conscious environmental history notwithstanding. Squirreled away in archives and offices, historians had instead written histories that abstracted people from the rest of nature. Inadvertently or not, historians had collectively bolstered a belief that humans were godlike, inhabiting a planet that had little influence on their affairs. Environmental historians, Worster noted, realize that we can no longer afford to be so naïve.³

Indeed, it was past time for historians to take the natural world seriously as an agent and presence in human history, and to begin crafting narratives that accounted for people’s role as biotic members of a planetary community. An obligation to produce more truthful historical narratives, no less than a moral imperative to cultivate an environmental ethic, demanded it. Doing so, however, required that historians reorient their research questions and methodologies to some degree. They would need to get out of the parliamentary chambers, out of the birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air, Worster suggested. It is time, he declared, that we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them.⁴

Worster’s call for a deeply material history that situated human societies in their natural contexts came as the field of environmental history was beginning to mature. Still relatively new—Worster’s essay appeared in a volume intended to introduce readers to the new and rapidly growing field of environmental history—the field already had a scholarly organization (the American Society for Environmental History, organized twelve years earlier) and prize-winning books (including Worster’s Bancroft-winning Dust Bowl and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land).⁵ Nevertheless, questions about the field lingered. Would it be a passing fad, akin perhaps to cliometrics? How should its practitioners approach their studies? Where should the field draw its boundaries? And, above all, what on earth did it mean to write environmental history?

The ensuing years have since answered the first question definitively. Over the past few decades, as Paul Sutter pointed out in 2013, environmental history has been one of the fastest-growing approaches to the study of the past within the larger profession.⁶ It has nudged and elbowed its way into the main currents of several historiographies and is making steady progress in others. Academic presses have launched book series with environmental history emphases, history departments have built research clusters in the field, its leading journals have steadily gained prestige, and membership in its professional organizations has grown exponentially.

The answers to the questions about its scope and purpose, however, have proven considerably less conclusive. Debates about the best way to approach the field and the kinds of boundaries (if any) that should be imposed upon it remain far from settled, a fact that has caused some consternation for the field and no small degree of navel-gazing in the years since the field’s founders first endeavored to establish an agenda for its practitioners.

Unsurprisingly for a maturing field seeking theoretical coherence in an era in which poststructural thought flourished, Worster’s materialist vision proved contested. Disagreements within the emergent field percolated to the surface, most prominently in a roundtable published in the Journal of American History (JAH) for which Worster provided the central essay. Calling for an environmental history that employed the environment as a historical lens, Worster laid out a methodological structure for the field that operated on three levels: a material level (to account for the ecosystems themselves), a political-economic level (to assess the role of various political economies in mediating people’s interactions with those ecosystems), and an intellectual one (to make sense of how various cultures at various times had thought about the natural world).⁷

This left environmental historians with the principal charge of figuring out which directions the arrows of causality pointed in a given case or, for that matter, writ large. For his part, Worster thought environmental historians would find the second level the most productive to explore. Redefining an old Marxian term, he encouraged the field’s practitioners to focus on modes of production, which, when boiled down in Worster’s understanding, centered on how people had gotten food into their bellies over time. Historians would find this second level particularly fruitful, Worster believed, because it would allow them to assess who has gained and who has lost power as modes of production have changed. His own work offered compelling models in this vein: Dust Bowl (1979) and Rivers of Empire (1985), especially, had highlighted the degree to which the capitalist drive to wring money from the earth had exacerbated inequalities of wealth and power even as it wrought profound ecological transformations; the exploitation of people and ecosystems were of a piece. It was through modes of production that the other-than-human world converged most obviously with the familiar economic and social terrain of historians.⁸

Predictably, not all of the respondents concurred with Worster’s proposed framework, and in taking issue with his vision for the field, they laid the foundation for the central debates that would shape it for the next decade and beyond.⁹ Richard White and William Cronon, especially, worried that Worster was too material in his focus and that his model left little room for much of the work being done by environmental historians. While their own studies had proven deeply material and explored issues of power in much the same way as Worster, Cronon and White nonetheless saw an emphasis on modes of production as a misguided one, prone to tendentious (perhaps even tautological) argumentation. Moreover, they contended that Worster’s materialist vision tended toward a naïve faith in an outmoded version of ecology, one that had given way to a version in which disturbance, instability, and change was the norm rather than stasis—a version that made assessing human interventions problematic.

The most resonant of their critiques, however, rested on the assumptions of poststructural theory. Worster’s base-structure-superstructure model, they argued, ran up against issues of scale and entailed a dangerous bent toward determinism. Nature, they asserted, was inevitably filtered through cultural lenses; human behavior toward the natural world was shaped by how people thought about it as much as by the material resources available to a given group at a given time. To a large degree, in fact, nature was culturally constructed; it was itself a cultural artifact. Questioning the hierarchies implicit in Worster’s model and rejecting the notion that the natural world offered any inherent values against which human behavior might be judged, White and Cronon, then, sought to place the emphasis on the degree to which cultural beliefs mediated the relationship between people and nature, and indeed blurred the line between the two.

In his rejoinder, Worster brushed aside the contention that his vision for the field hinged on an uncritical faith in ecology. No one who had read Nature’s Economy (1977), he suggested, could accuse him of a naïve faith in the science. There, in what amounted to the first scholarly treatment of ecology’s history, Worster had traced the growing influence of science as a trusted authority in mediating our understanding of the natural world, paying particular attention to the contingencies of its development.¹⁰ Although he had not focused on the history of meaning in the way his critics enamored of poststructural theory wanted, Worster had nevertheless proven unequivocal in his rejection of science as an infallible authority on moral issues. If on balance, he welcomed the rise of ecology, finding in it a rationale for respecting the natural world and embracing a more humble view of people’s place in it, he had been absolutely clear in Nature’s Economy and elsewhere that the questions raised by environmentalists were too important to be left for scientists alone to answer.¹¹

The heart of his rejoinder, however, could be readily gathered from its title—Seeing beyond Culture—and underscored the fact that the alternatives put forward by his respondents posed dangers of their own: from descending into the same downward spiral that social history has taken toward fragmentation and a paralyzing fear of all generalization to getting bogged down in a relativistic morass from which there was no ready deliverance.¹² More to the point, his respondents’ proposals jeopardized the field’s chief insight by threatening to reduce the field to a subcategory of social and cultural history. Indeed, Worster maintained, the path laid out by his critics threatened to recapitulate the long-standing conceit that people were gods, bending the material world to meet their whims. No landscape is completely cultural, he reminded them. By their very definition, landscapes were "the result of interactions between nature and culture.¹³ Historians, of course, could produce studies deeply rooted in the natural world that also effectively engaged ideas, as was evident in the fact that each of the contributors to the roundtable had managed pretty well to integrate the ideal with the material."¹⁴ But, to his mind, the discipline’s core innovation would be lost if historians neglected the natural world as an independent entity.

Worster’s rebuttals notwithstanding, the perspective of his critics endowed the field with obvious advantages as it blossomed over the next decade. Chief among them was the degree to which it facilitated the field’s acceptance by other historians, who were inclined to focus on things cultural (and then largely by way of poststructural analysis). To this was added the fact that in contrast to a more materialist vision, a cultural approach to environmental history required no special source materials that historians might find unfamiliar. These proved powerful inducements to practice a less material environmental history, and over the course of the 1990s, environmental historians began to speak of the field’s cultural turn.¹⁵ At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cultural turn was amplified by the steadily growing presence of historians of science in the field, who brought with them a perspective that saw science principally as an object of enquiry, and proved skeptical of drawing on it as a source of evidence, let alone argumentation.

Together, the insights of poststructuralism and the erosion of scientific authority transformed the field of environmental history. Undeniably, they brought an increased sophistication to it: problematizing older, linear narratives that had uncritically celebrated the rise of modern environmentalism; incorporating previously marginalized groups and neglected spaces; and, above all, muddying the divide between nature and culture. Collectively, these studies broadened the field’s appeal and contributed to its growing popularity. By the early aughts, the ASEH could claim 1,000 individual members, and its conferences began moving away from smaller venues to major cities.¹⁶

Equally indisputably, however, poststructural thinking and the undermining of scientific certainty compromised the field’s moral agenda. The Calvinist jeremiads of the first generation of environmental historians gave way to Universalist musings; tragic emplotments became satires; declensionist narratives were ridiculed as a hindrance in the field’s march toward the mainstream. If the nature-culture divide was rightly muddled, the muddling was largely unidirectional. Myriad studies highlighted the degree to which culture had shaped nature; seldom did causality flow in the other direction.

It might be overdrawn to insist that the field lost its way, its moral center eroding even as the number of its practitioners grew, but there’s no doubt that it was a sharply depoliticized environmental history that won professional acceptance, nor that environmental historians proved increasingly hard-pressed to delimit the field’s boundaries. To be sure, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, environmental history had long attracted scholars across a wide range of disciplines. The boundary between historical geography and environmental history, for instance, proved fuzzy even under the narrowest definition of the field. The walls demarcating the field’s boundaries, in other words, had always been marked by doors and windows.

But as the cultural turn gained ascendancy, the field’s demarcations grew even murkier, its scope and purpose more unsettled than ever. As the title of Douglas Weiner’s 2005 presidential address to the ASEH—A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition for Environmental History—suggests, this didn’t dissuade environmental historians from seeking to clarify them.¹⁷ Indeed, Weiner’s effort proved to be one of many such attempts to define the field and speculate about its future.¹⁸ While these efforts surely reflected an expanding interest in environmental history, they just as certainly revealed a deep-seated concern in many quarters about its lack of coherence.

This concern notwithstanding, the field as a whole proved reluctant to establish, let alone police, disciplinary boundaries. As John McNeill noted in 2003, environmental history’s institutionalization remain[ed] limited, its borders undefended.¹⁹ The field never demanded, for instance, that environmental historians employ the environment as a category of analysis in the way that, say, a social historian would be expected to apply gender as a lens. This elasticity succeeded in creating an environment that attracted innovative scholars working in a number of historical subdisciplines, but it resulted in a field that essentially came to function as a tent under which a diverse array of scholars could gather rather than as a discipline with a discreet set of working assumptions and historical tools. The field, in short, disaggregated into a series of island communities (with due apologies to Robert Wiebe), which may or may not be in conversation with one another (or with broader historiographical currents) at any given moment.²⁰ In this regard it has mirrored the historical profession writ large, which, pulled by the same centrifugal forces tugging at the rest of society, has spun off a steadily growing number of subdisciplines in recent decades.

Judging by a recent roundtable on the state of the field, environmental historians remain unsure of the degree to which this is to be commended or lamented. Linda Nash, for instance, embraced this development, arguing that the time had come for environmental historians to acknowledge that theirs is less a coherent ‘field’ of study structured around key archives, topics, or questions—in the sense that Worster once hoped it would be, or that American political or labor history is—than an orientation. Its success, she continued, should be measured by its incorporation into works that are not self-consciously environmental.²¹ How exactly that might be assessed, given the elastic definition of environmental history, she left open to question.

Paul Sutter, on the other hand, who had studied under Worster and who contributed the core essay for the roundtable, proved considerably more ambivalent about the fact that on balance environmental history had proceeded along the more self-conscious and critical path urged by Worster’s respondents. He found a great deal to like about the field, acknowledging among other things that environmental historians were now telling more complex, contingent, and counterintuitive stories than they had been at the time of the first JAH roundtable. Nevertheless, he worried that they often privilege the social and cultural at the expense of the environmental and wondered if the field had misplaced its moral compass. Indeed, he concluded by urging his peers to look up from their tight focus on complexity and hybridity and return some of their attention to the enormous transformations wrought by people as biotic members of a planetary community.²²

If recent discussions about the degree to which the field might have lost its way are any indication, that debate will continue for some time.²³ As will the angst. There are few indications, however, that Worster has wasted much energy worrying about the drift of the field. Having framed his position clearly, he has been happy to let others reach their own conclusions.²⁴ Good, he noted of his respondents’ critiques about his eagerness to push the agency of nature in the 1990 roundtable, at least I am understood in my tendencies.²⁵ To be sure, while he has helped keep environmental history vital by carrying the flag for those whose work runs counter to the field’s prevailing currents, his ambitions have always been higher, both in his intended historiographic interventions and in his hopes for a brighter environmental future.

The esoteric nuances of scholarly debates have thus interested but never satisfied him. Recognizing, like Carl Becker did before him, that history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world, Worster has pushed for something more.²⁶ He has sought to inform broader intellectual currents, to shape more effective environmental policies that account for the historical forces that necessitate them in the first place no less than historiographical debates. This conviction, together with the fact that the environmental issues facing the world in the twenty-first century are often global in scale, has led him to champion environmental history around the world. If the work of environmental historians is to matter in shaping environmental policy going forward, after all, it cannot be parochial in its practice. Indeed, no one has served as a more tireless ambassador for the development of the field beyond the United States than Worster. Among other things, he has worked closely with the now very influential Rachel Carson Center in Munich from its inception and, following his retirement from the University of Kansas, helped to found and direct the Center for Ecological History at Renmin University in Beijing, the leading research center for environmental history in Asia.

The growth of environmental history in the United States and around the world, then, has proven a victory for Worster in its own right. If environmental history as a whole is less politically engaged than he hoped it would be, its practitioners now have a place at the table; they are solidly entrenched in the broader historiographical discussions. If the field is less firmly grounded in materialist analyses than he envisioned, environmental historians need not fear that other historians will look askance at research that explores the role and place of nature in human life.²⁷ In the event, the field’s growth has given Worster a platform that has enabled him to repeatedly enjoin historians to take nature more seriously in their explorations of the past.²⁸

This volume seeks simply to amplify that call. Thus despite the fact, as Sutter noted, that many of the methodological and analytical tensions laid bare in the 1990 roundtable persist, it is not our intention to recapitulate the debates of the 1990s.²⁹ Instead, the essays in this collection highlight Worster’s continued centrality to the field and suggest ways environmental historians might draw upon his work going forward. His pioneering work, after all, laid the foundation for many of environmental history’s most vital currents: the history of capitalism, transnational history, environmental biography, the origins of modern environmentalism, resource use, natural disasters, the history of science, and the connections between social and environmental exploitation. William Cronon hardly exaggerated when he noted of Worster that all of us who write environmental history follow in his footsteps.³⁰

The contributors to this volume would all claim an even more direct tie to Worster: some as his students, others as his colleagues, still others as coworkers in the effort to broaden the influence of environmental history around the world. Connecting their own research to Worster’s, the authors of these essays propose paths that other environmental historians might productively follow. In that sense their essays are invitations: to approach familiar stories differently, to integrate new methodologies, to think creatively about the questions environmental historians are well positioned to answer, and to historicize the ecological problems facing the world today.

While these essays do not endeavor to settle long-standing debates about the field, they nevertheless collectively bring some clarity to what it means to write environmental history. To the degree that they do so with courage, an eye on the big picture, and a passion for nature, they offer models for the field truly inspired by Worster. If they encourage their readers to again find a good set of walking shoes and ramble once more into the fields, woods, and open air, unafraid of tracking a little mud into the archives, this volume will prove a success indeed.

Notes

I would like to thank Ted Steinberg, Ryan Schumacher, and Tom Okie for their comments on this essay.

1. Donald Worster, Appendix: Doing Environmental History, in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 289; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 12.

2. Worster had made a similar contention four years earlier in an essay titled History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method. Evolution and history remain, after a hundred years, separate realms of discourse, he had argued. There is little history in the study of nature and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we remedy that lag by developing a new perspective on the historians’ enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last. Donald Worster, History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method, Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 1.

3. Worster, Doing Environmental History, 290.

4. Worster, Doing Environmental History, 289.

5. Donald Worster, preface to Worster, Ends of the Earth, vii.

6. Paul S. Sutter, The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History, Journal of American History 100 (June 2013): 95. For more on the field’s growth, see Robert B. Townsend, The Rise and Decline of History Specializations over the Past 40 Years, Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, December 2015, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2015/the-rise-and-decline-of-history-specializations-over-the-past-40-years.

7. Donald Worster, Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History, Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087–1106. For earlier discussions about the scope and purpose of the field, see Roderick Nash, The State of Environmental History, in The State of American History, ed. H. J. Bass (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970): 249–60; Richard White, Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field, Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985): 297–335; Worster, History as Natural History, 1–19; and Theories of Environmental History, special issue, Environmental Review 11 (Winter 1987).

8. Worster, Transformations of the Earth, 1091–92, 1090; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

9. For the responses, see the following from the Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): Alfred Crosby, An Enthusiastic Second, 1107–10; Richard White, Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning, 1111–16; Carolyn Merchant, Gender and Environmental History, 1117–21; William Cronon, Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History, 1122–31; and Stephen J. Pyne, Firestick History, 1132–41. For a broader take on the roundtable, see Sutter, The World with Us, 94–96.

10. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

11. Donald Worster, The Ecology of Order and Chaos, Environmental History Review 14 (Spring/Summer 1990): 16.

12. Donald Worster, Seeing beyond Culture, Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1144–45.

13. Worster, Seeing beyond Culture, 1144. Emphasis in the original.

14. Worster, Seeing beyond Culture, 1142.

15. For a survey of the broad contours of this turn, see Richard White, From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History Historian 66 (Fall 2004): 557–64.

16. Thanks to Lisa Mighetto for providing information on ASEH membership.

17. Douglas R. Weiner, A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History, Environmental History 10 (July 2005): 404–20.

18. For a representative sample, see Alfred Crosby, The Past and Present of Environmental History, American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1177–89; Mart A. Stewart, Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field, The History Teacher 31 (May 1998): 351–68; Adam Rome, What Really Matters in History: Environmental Perspectives on Modern America, Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 303–18; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History, American Historical Review 107 (June 2002): 798–20; John R. McNeill, Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History, in Environment and History, theme issue, History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 5–43; Anniversary Forum: What’s Next for Environmental History, Environmental History (January 2005): 30–109; Libby Robin and Jane Carruthers, Introduction: Environmental History and the History of Biology, History of Biology 44 (April 2011): 1–4; Sarah T. Phillips, Environmental History, in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 285–313; Liza Piper, Knowing Nature through History, History Compass 11 (December 2013): 1139–49; and Andrew C. Isenberg, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Isenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–20. See also Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Douglas Cazaux Sackman, ed., A Companion to American Environmental History (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

19. McNeill, Observations, 11.

20. In acknowledging the fragmentation and reconstitution of environmental history in recent years, Paul Sutter listed a dozen fields and might well have added several more. See Sutter, The World with Us, 97.

21. Linda Nash, Furthering the Environmental Turn, Journal of American History 100 (June 2013): 133, 134.

22. Sutter, The World with Us, 96, 118, 119.

23. See Lisa Brady, Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?, Process: A Blog for American History, December 15, 2015, http://www.processhistory.org/has-environmental-history-lost-its-way; Joshua Specht, Finding Its Way: Thoughts on Environmental History, Process: A Blog for American History, January 19, 2016, http://www.processhistory.org/finding-its-way-thoughts-on-environmental-history; Sean Kheraj, with guests Lisa Brady, Mark Hersey, and Liza Piper, Episode 51: Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?, Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, January 27, 2016, http://niche-canada.org/2016/01/27/natures-past-episode-51-has-environmental-history-lost-its-way.

24. Bill Cronon made much the same point in a keynote address at a conference in Worster’s honor hosted by Renmin University’s Center for Ecological History in June 2016. A program of that conference is available at http://www.ruc.edu.cn/loadnotice?tid=3&nid=71717 (accessed June 12, 2017).

25. Worster, Seeing beyond Culture, 1144.

26. Carl Becker, Every Man His Own Historian, American Historical Review 37 (January 1932): 234.

27. Worster, Transformations of the Earth, 1089.

28. See, for instance, Donald Worster, The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences, Environment and History 2 (February 1996): 3–14; Donald Worster, A Long, Cold View of History: How Ice, Worms, and Dirt Made Us What We Are Today, American Scholar 74 (Spring 2005): 57–66; Donald Worster, Historians and Nature, American Scholar 79 (Spring 2010), https://theamericanscholar.org/historians-and-nature/#.WtC19S-ZPUI; and Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

29. Sutter, The World with Us, 96.

30. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xxiii.

I

FACING LIMITS

Nature, it should be clear, has limits; they are neither inflexible, nor are they constant, but they do exist. Whenever the dust begins to blow, we are being told what those limits are.

—Donald Worster, Dust Bowl (1979)

The wealth of nature, when appropriated and turned to use, touched off a multifaceted revolution in society, economy, politics, and culture, which swept over the entire globe. It stimulated a shift in perception, but it also changed people’s material conditions. For a while the perceptual change was congruent with the material one, but then perception outran reality. During the twentieth century, however, it became increasingly clear that the modern era of extraordinary material abundance was coming to an end, and that neither scientific knowledge, innovation in technology, or hard work could bring it back.

—Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth (2016)

Each of the essays in this section takes as its starting point one of the core threads of Donald Worster’s scholarship: the failure of generations past to acknowledge and account for material limits to economic growth. The degree to which economic imperatives have shaped people’s interactions with the natural world emerged as a theme in Worster’s dissertation in 1971 and has since arced through his scholarship. Over the course of four decades, he has explored the ways in which a shortsighted refusal to face environmental limits has led to profoundly undemocratic and environmentally destructive consequences.

Worster identifies the root cause of the problems as capitalism, which he has defined as an economic culture with a distinctive ethos that includes, among other things, the idea that nature must be understood as a form of capital. Leveraging the power of large institutions (most especially the state), capitalism has separated people from the natural world, cultivated an irrationally optimistic view of people’s ability to control nature, fostered an insatiable hunger for resources, and kindled an ill-founded belief in perpetual technological fixes. With the intersection of economy and ecology firmly ensconced at the heart of his research, Worster has continued to return to capitalism for nearly forty years: in Dust Bowl (1979), in Rivers of Empire (1985), in his biographies of John Wesley Powell and John Muir, and most recently in Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (2016).

It is with this emphasis in mind that Ted Steinberg reminds us of environmental history’s radical roots. Worster’s indictment of a capitalist economic culture that fostered both social oppression and environmental exploitation shared some important characteristics with the work of radical historians, but arguably proved even more radical insofar as it challenged the anthropocentrism of the historical profession. Yet most radical of all, Steinberg contends, has been Worster’s unflinching commitment to moral reason over the course of his career, a commitment driven by a desire not only for a more humane society, but also for one that operates with less violence toward the planet that sustains us all.

Adam Rome taps into this thread of Worster’s scholarship by challenging environmental historians to think more deeply about capitalism. Environmental historians, Rome argues, have too often understood capitalism as a discreet set of static assumptions rather than a complex and ever-changing force. Over the past fifty years, as Rome points out, businesses have increasingly taken measures to reduce their direct and indirect environmental impact, but historians have paid them little attention. This, he suggests, is a serious oversight. Some might dismiss the question of whether capitalism can ever lead to harmonious relations with the earth, but the question must be asked if we hope to understand and address the myriad environmental issues facing us today.

Although Worster’s conviction that societies need to frankly acknowledge material limits was rooted in the study of history, he pursued his research with an eye on contemporary environmental issues. Following suit, Frank Zelko raises important questions about what environmentalism ought to mean in the age of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch shaped principally by humans. Examining the epistemological questions elicited by this concept, Zelko contends that environmental historians are uniquely situated to examine the perils of the Anthropocene concept. However useful the Anthropocene might be intellectually, Zelko argues, the optimistic enthusiasm for planetary management embraced by some of its advocates threatens to recapitulate the same rejection of environmental limits that created the epoch in the first place.

Kevin Armitage, likewise, highlights the intrinsic limits of technological innovation. Taking up the career of Thomas Midgley Jr., who improbably and rather remarkably gave the world both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons, Armitage asks environmental historians to consider why technological innovation has often carried far-reaching unintended consequences. Midgley’s innovations, he argues, emerged out of a larger social and economic context that locked him into a narrow technological framework that led him to ask the wrong sorts of questions. That framework rested on market pressures that worked to assure that the innovations became an end in themselves and in so doing prevented a consideration of their ultimate consequences.

Christof Mauch and Brian Black take up a more willful refusal to face limits by considering the ways in which Americans have deliberately ignored, and often downplayed, the possibility of ecological catastrophe. Mauch does so by exploring a single locality in the American West: the affluent, beachfront city of Malibu, California. Highlighting the extraordinary efforts necessary to perpetuate Malibu’s reputation as a veritable paradise in the face of myriad natural hazards, Mauch underscores the promising possibilities open to environmental historians in examining the environmental context of similar cultural landmarks.

Black examines this refusal to face limits on a larger scale, exploring the emergence of an American way of life predicated on cheap crude. As Black shows, the consumption of petroleum products defined American society and culture over the latter half of the twentieth century. The ways in which Americans powered their lives, he contends, merit more attention from environmental historians than they have received to date.

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Subversive Subjects

Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History

TED STEINBERG

If ecology, as Paul Sears once said, is a subversive subject, what of environmental history?¹

Environmental history had its start in the 1970s at